![]() In emails, I still button myself up in formal language, but in my professional Slacks and Gchats, the more informal I am, the more comfortable I am around you. In Slack messages, I find periods can aggressively signal that the conversation is not just over, but OVER.Īs an example: When your boss asks for one more task, you can reply “fine,” or “fine.” The former is a happy-go-lucky shrug of “whatever.” The latter indicates you’re angry or annoyed.Ī quick guide to working with millennials: the more formal the language they use, the more they are telegraphing keeping you at arms’ length. Periods in text messages can even be interpreted as being a jerk. In a 2016 study, researchers found that university students rated texts that ended with periods as less sincere than those that ended without one. Adding a period in these cases can seem excessive, and even aggressive. In text message bubbles, you already know when the sentence has come to an end, so you don’t need the full stop of a period. They are the equivalent of too-formal text messages from your parents that start with “Dear son” and end, “Sincerely, Mama.” If you want to communicate well across generations in the workplace, drop your periods. Periods carry a stern finality in instant messenger communications. One popular corrective many people use is to overcompensate with friendliness, piling on exclamation points and smiley faces.īut even that gets complicated: Was tacking on that smiley face emoji after a work request cheerful or passive aggressive? It can be both! Allow me to be your millennial soothsayer on this translation journey down into what gestures can be misconstrued and how you can avoid them. When you can’t see the person on the other side of your screen, it’s harder to interpret feelings, and there are usually no easy answers. ![]() Welcome to the new era of emojis, no periods and “thx” instead of “thank you” between your request for project deadlines.Īs a millennial who has worked on all of these platforms, I have witnessed firsthand how tone can be misconstrued between millennials used to texting informally and older generations who have been trained to always use proper punctuation in work emails. And never mind the difficulty in interpreting jokes. We’ve seen colleagues give each other the cold shoulder for days because of a too-formal punctuation mark in a Gchat message or an errant GIF in Slack. Then why do we still misunderstand each other all the time? Thanks. Team messaging apps have, for several years, brought informal text messaging into the workplace: Slack messages, Facebook Messenger, and Gchat have all become replacements for email, allowing colleagues to communicate with their teams without having to speak out loud very often.
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